


Assimilation

by selryel



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2016-09-08
Packaged: 2018-08-13 20:26:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7985116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selryel/pseuds/selryel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Devour the essence of your foes. This is the way of the blue mage. The evolution cannot be stopped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Assimilation

**Autotomy**

 

Xu looks up as I enter her office.  Her eyes move over me in an instant of evaluation.  She nods once, having concluded her diagnosis.

"You're going," she offers, saving me the trouble.

"I am."

She nods again, businesslike, and returns to her monitor. 

The chessboard of her office invites stillness, reflection.  Moments pass by and I try to wrap myself in the room's familiar sounds.  The inescapable hum of electronic and moving air, a soft _thrum_ masquerading as silence.  The resolute tick of a clock, analogue; anachronism as rebellion.  From the fountain on the table, the running of water over stones; counterpoint to the clock, a wholly different measure of time.

And always, staccato bursts of typing, effortless and efficient; a conductor at her podium.  Beneath her fingers, missions dance and cavort, flights reroute, SeeDs deploy and find themselves recalled.  One by one, the hooks of the system retract.  My guardian angel works her magic, freeing me of classes, lectures, meetings, assignments, missions and the thousand other commitments that tie me to this place. 

She asks me nothing, demands nothing.  We have outgrown that conversation.  The _when_ and _where_ of the clock yield to the relentless water.  It rushes over me, carrying me along with it, finally letting me breathe. 

From a thousand miles away, the phone in my hand beeps.  I glance down at it and offer a few conciliatory taps in response.  Xu's monitor chirps its confirmation.  In the distance, she looks up at me, her form receding on the horizon. 

"You're all set, King," she says, granting me my parole. 

I abandon my phone to her desk.  She smiles at this, our secret treason, the joy of cutting the unbreakable tether.  Like a magician at work, she sweeps the phone into her hand, off the desk, into a drawer. 

I whisper my thanks to her, a last gasp before surrendering to the undertow.  I hear her final words, cast down from the surface.  For the sake of formality, she phrases them in the plural. 

"We'll be waiting."

**Recrudescence**

I have the train car to myself.  The wheels pound out a steady rhythm in the tunnel, lulling me.  In that liminal darkness beneath the world, I exist _between._   Neither asleep nor awake, I remember. 

The hot sting of rejection; embarrassment and frustration and self-loathing closing in around me, embracing me.  Worse than the rejection: his pity, his kindness and concern, as though, with the world turning to ash at my fingertips, he could mend me.  His careful maneuvers, gently voicing truths I already know.  Not _just_ rejection, the numbing anesthesia of disinterest.  No, rejection _in favor of_. 

Those three words make the difference.  Not anything that comes after them.  She is, and I am not.  Rejection of X in favor of Not-X.  The variables change, but precious little else does.  The predictability of the equation does nothing to blunt its edges.  Every time cuts as deep as the first, because every time, I believed it wouldn't happen. 

Another rejection, from years before, this one more welcome.  He placed the blame on himself as he left – very gallant; the lie fooled no one.  I remember a picture, the one taken of the two of us together at a party, a flickering attempt to merge our social circles.  In the picture, he looks at me, and I look off-camera, laughing at the spot where Zell and Irvine stand arguing. 

After eight months with him, that picture, and a toothbrush left in my room, represented the only impact he'd made on my life.  He left and I barely noticed.  Part of me wants to link the two together.  Recent failure as punishment for past performance.  I toy with that notion for a moment.  It implies a fairness, a balancing of scales with the eventual hope of reward. 

The scales do not exist.  In their place, the serpent devours his own tail.  The cycle repeats forever and always and I do not escape. 

Some lessons take root at once, while some refuse to stay learned.  Each time I say that I have grown, gained something for it, won't repeat the same mistakes.  But the cycle encompasses that, too.  Then comes the first flush, the curiosity, the excitement, the hope of a different result. 

Yet here I am, driven away from my own life.  The train rumbles on through its artificial night. **  
**

**Mimesis**

I emerge into a riot of noise and color and smell.  Bodies press against me, trains whistle their departure, unintelligible messages blare from speakers.  I steel myself and push back against the tumult, my heart unexpectedly racing. 

I have done my time in the city.  I have pounded across moonlit rooftops and slogged through the fetid sewers.  I have attended galas and staged museum heists.  I watched a dictator die, an assassination fail, and my friends beaten and imprisoned.  In short, the city holds few secrets for me. 

Why, then, does it always feel so alien when I emerge like this?  Crowded and swarming, the buildings threatening to topple, the gray sky promising to suffocate me.  

My eyes scan the crowd.  They stare unthinking at a thousand neon lies and I marvel at their credulity.  They huddle together into a delusion of safety and warmth.  A siren calls out in the distance and they freeze as one, conditioned into immobility by years of training. 

I walk.  Half a block later, a small phalanx of black vehicles streaks past, windows tinted.  They will arrive, shouting orders and brandishing weapons.  Someone will find himself beaten and stuffed into the back of the van, a black bag over his head.  No one will hear from him again.  Satisfied that this scene will play out _elsewhere_ , movement on the street resumes. 

A car waits for me in a parking lot.  I slip inside, glad for the partition and silence. 

**Migration**

I drive through the darkness and by sunup I reach Dollet. It peers through the morning mist, disaffected and world-weary but somehow more welcoming.  Having long ago accepted its decline, the city perches on its ocean terrace and smokes and watches the world fall apart. 

Unlike Galbadia with its infinite staring eyes, the presence of one more outsider cannot pierce Dollet's ennui.  At this point, even another full-scale invasion wouldn't warrant putting down the espresso.  After parking the car, I move through the cobblestone streets, basking in the indifference. 

An endless row of shops stretches before me, owners setting out their wares to attract foot traffic.  I leave the main street behind and turn down an alleyway.  Then another and another.  Up a staircase.  Through a tunnel I think started life as a culvert.  Cross a bridge spanning a disused aqueduct.  Down a staircase.  Another alley.  And so on, following a winding path into an ever-tightening spiral. 

At the center, beneath a sign so faded that it offers no information to the potential customer, squats the… shop.  I employ the term charitably.  Normally, I reserve the word for places that sell products, attract customers, and transact business.  A shop this suspect usually appears to the unwitting protagonist to sell them something cursed and then vanishes by the time they try to return it. 

I push through the door and the bell starts to ding but gives up halfway through, as though it had gotten bored and wandered away.  The smells assault me first.  Dust allowed to run thick and unchallenged.  Stale smoke.  Coffee burned to the point that I'd classify it as a war crime. 

At a table, a woman sits alone, reading as always.  Immobile except for the motion of her eyes and the flicking of her hand to turn the page.  All these years and I've never seen her move from that spot.  I think she came with the room. 

The sound of beads rattling shakes me from my distraction.  I look up to see Waoud emerging from the back room, a proprietor every bit as dodgy as his bazaar. 

He wears a cardigan that may once have had a quantifiable color but that now aspires to gray.  Corduroy pants, the same, shapeless and worn in all the wrong places.  Glasses smudged to the point of opacity. 

"Welcome, welcome," he fawns, extending hands to me.  "So wonderful to see you."  He gestures obsequiously to the burbling monstrosity on the counter.  "Coffee?" 

"No, thanks.  I was hoping—" 

"Of course, of course," he cuts me off, bowing for emphasis.  "How rude of me."  With the barest whisper of his fingers on the small of my back, he guides me towards the beaded curtain.  "Right this way." 

I take a deep breath before stepping through and the sense of dislocation takes hold of me, a shock like stepping under a waterfall.  I hang in time and space for a long moment, suspended, while the world tries to sort out the messy details.  

**Apolysis**

In my own private time compression, I relive the first time I came here. 

We have just saved the world.  Squall has come home.  The party turns into our long-delayed Garden Festival, and the business of mercenary life grinds to a halt. 

As the Garden's mood lightens, mine grows increasingly dark.  I have lost my position as an Instructor.  Everywhere I look I see Squall and Rinoa taking their first tentative steps at a relationship not threatened by the end of the world.  People tell me to cheer up, to smile more, to stop taking things so seriously.  As if all pain and suffering died with the Sorceress. 

I feel trapped.  Infuriated by my circumstances.  Humiliated by my loss.  Slighted by my superiors.  I feel the laughter behind my back, at the once rising star whose career died a spectacular death in Dollet.  For the first time, I understand Ultimecia and the boundless, clawing hate that makes a siren song of mass extinction.  It coils within my stomach and consumes my waking hours.  Then, as now, Xu engineers my flight, working whatever bureaucratic wizardry she must to make it something palatable like medical leave or vacation time.

By the time I detrain in Timber, I can no longer tolerate the presence of civilization.  I stow my bags at a safehouse and take nothing with me but Save the Queen.

I spend a lifetime in the wilderness, feral and uncontrolled, hunting and hiding.  Although I do not notice it, something pulls me ever north.  I approach the city of Dollet reluctantly, unable to resist the magnetism that has drawn me here.  I move through the city by night, skittish and hiding from all human contact.  But a scent on the wind calls to me.  It leads me here, to this shop.

Waoud waits for me, although I do not yet know his name.  The woman in the chair reads.  He says nothing but, with a gesture, indicates the bead curtain.

I push through, experience the dislocation, and emerge on the other side, broken and screaming my agony.  I drop to my knees, suffering wounds I cannot imagine.  The room has changed somehow.  My training and my instincts fail as I beg for my torment to end.

A voice fills my ears, clipped and precise.  Cold and somehow amused.

"The blue magic attacks your every cell.  Your body fights to contain the energy, but your soul screams out in agony."

I try to move, to throw up an imploring hand, anything.  I cannot.

The voice continues, not deigning to notice my struggle.  I detect a note of bragging.  "This is my domain.  Through the power of the magic I have devoured, I have isolated this place from the outside world.  Here, the deterioration of the soul is far more obvious."

The voice draws close, as if he's bending over me. For a moment, he sounds almost impressed.

"You cannot even stand.  You must have gorged yourself to reach this condition."

The voice goes back to that of the clinician. A pair of shoes manifest in front of my eyes.  "First, know this, little sister: I will never prevent your self-destruction."

He moves aside.

"Two paths lie open before you.  Accept that the vessel you have become has reached its limit."

He places a small parcel on the floor, outside my reach.

"Or travel to the location I have given you.  You will find a dreadful fiend there.  It will almost certainly kill you.   Should you survive, drink deep of the chalice presented to you.  Flood your soul with even more poison.  Only then may you return."

Footsteps.  Walking away.  He hasn't left.  I can feel him watching me.

"This is the path you have chosen: wait for oblivion to claim you or continue to writhe within the energies of your foes.  You stand at a fork in the road."

Too weak to stand, I stretch out an arm.  My fingers scrabble for purchase on the floor and I drag myself forward.  The motion nauseates me, the world pitching and yawing like a ship in a storm.  I continue my slow crawl towards the package.  My suffering has not lessened; in fact it grows more acute with each passing second. 

His words have given me a much-needed clarity, however.  I recognize my current physical distress as nothing more than a symptom, the most recent manifestation of the thing that has plagued me.  I have given a name to my anguish: hunger.

I lurch forward again.  My hand closes on the package, and I take a deep breath, exhausted.  I continue towards the barrier that will release me from this place, hoping I can work up the strength to stand once outside.

I hear his voice from behind me.  Grim and proud.  "The depths of your ambition have been noted."

  **Convergence**

The dislocation passes, the memory fades, and I emerge into his lair.  The air of the place courses into me like electricity.  The hunger rises within me, snapping viciously at the magic all around.

From the shop floor, the back room appears as a cramped office.  One desk, one chair, every surface covered in paper.  Crossing the threshold, though, it changes.  The impossibly large room within lit by torches, all burning with an eerie blue flame.  Soft cushions surround a low table, an impromptu teahouse in the middle of the room.  A screen blocks off half the room.

He has changed too.  Waoud, the shifty, servile persona he wears in the outer room, has vanished.  Now I see Raubahn, standing tall, ramrod straight, garbed from head-to-toe in delicate blue silks, his face covered by a veil.  His eyes, though, glow with the blue-green intensity of an argon laser.

His fingertips, feather-light, remove from my back.  "You will be wanting tea," he says, brushing past me and disappearing behind the screen.  His voice now has a clipped precision to it, an accent that defies localization.  People from Dollet would swear he hails from Esthar.  People from Esthar would insist on Balamb.  I have classified it as "other."

I lower myself to a cushion and wait, trying to place the incense burning in the room.  Sandalwood, perhaps.

Raubahn returns and hands a cup of tea to me, placing one on the table for himself.  Even reclining on a cushion he remains taut and tense, a coiled spring.

"Drink deep, little sister." He always gives the name a little weight – something more than a nickname.  A title, maybe.

I take a long draw on the tea.  I stifle a groan; it makes the hunger simultaneously more intense and more bearable.  He removes his veil with little fanfare.  The first time I saw him do so, the plainness of his features surprised me.  No human face should fit with those eyes.

Raubahn holds the tea to his face, breathes deep through his nose, takes a long drink.  He sits with his eyes fixed on me, searching, probing.

"You are troubled," he observes.  The words themselves implicate sympathy, but I know better.  His voice contains nothing of kindness or understanding; he probes the wound and nothing more.  His dispassion does not trouble me.  I did not come for friendship.

"The first time I came here, you said there were two paths open to me." 

He nods, takes a sip of tea.  "I recall."

"If I had chosen oblivion—"

He exhales once, sharply, the sound derisive, a harsh approximation of a laugh.  I press the point.

"If I had gone back to my life?"

His head inclines slightly.  "Were you tempted?"

 I reply honestly.  "No."

I have often asked myself the same question.  Wracked with unutterable pain and given the option to crawl back the way I had come, I chose the path lined with razor blades. He called it poison, but offered me more and even as I felt the magic trying to kill me, I leapt at the chance.

It troubles me.

He considers my answer for a moment.  "You are curious.  You wish to know what would have happened to you."

Raubahn takes the last sip of tea, places the cup back on the table, reaffixes his veil.  Stands and faces me.

"The catacombs beneath the city.  Find the thing that has taken up residence there. When you are done, search the body.  Bring me what you find."

A new wrinkle.  No packet of directions this time, and I've never had to bring back _proof._   "What am I—"

He raises a hand to interrupt my question.  "Believe me, little sister: you will know it when you see it."

Our audience concluded, he ushers me out of the sanctum, past the reading woman, and back to the street.

**Exuvia**

I spend a day in preparation, gathering supplies, conducting research, chasing down rumors.  A homeless woman who vanished; an urban explorer who never returned.  Not much to go on, but I have a starting point.  I need little else.  When night falls, I descend underground.

 Originally stone mines, the catacombs extend beneath the city in every direction, the final resting place for countless millions of bodies.  By day, tourists flock to some of the upper levels, viewing sculptures and frescoes proclaiming the kingdom of death.

 In my search, I leave these well-travelled paths far behind and push on into the lightless depths beneath.  Night vision goggles need light to amplify, and carrying my own light would advertise my presence.  So, as always, I _adapt_.

 I see tunnels used by resistance fighters and mass graves for victims of the guillotine.  A famous composer given a pauper's funeral rests down here somewhere, but he's lost a few pounds in the past centuries and I don't know that I could recognize him. 

 I have yet to catch a glimpse of the thing, but I have decided the creature must possess intelligence.  It could stick to the upper levels, snag stray tourists, and do very well for itself.  But that would attract attention.  So it hides deep inside, takes only occasional victims.  Even covers its tracks.  That revelation speeds my search considerably.  I seek out the conspicuous absence of clues.  A pathway devoid of dust in which the creature might have left tracks.

 Hints come to me only sporadically, and the residents – so to speak – maintain their silence, watching my progress with empty eyes.  They have their uses, though – a stray femur or a row of skulls with one member askew provides enough to keep me moving forward.  Sometimes I proceed on intuition alone, the indefinable _tug_ that tells me to go left instead of right.

 I enjoy this process more than I care to admit.

 I squeeze through a narrow passageway into a large room, vast enough that I recognize it as an early quarry.  I hear a trickle of water from somewhere; an aqueduct overhead, perhaps.  Something changes in the quality of the air, and I know I've found it.

**Peramorphosis**

 I freeze, give my brain a moment to catch up to what my senses have deduced.  I smell death.  Not just bone, _death_ **.**   A rotting corpse, here, in a part of the catacombs that hasn't seen a fresh body in at least a thousand years.

 The size of the room, the cavernous depth of it, makes it treacherous.  A loose stone or incautious step could mean disaster, so I take my time heading for the lower levels.  On a terrace beneath me, I come across a pile of corpses in varying states of decomposition.  Between the smell and the potential for ambush, I can't spend too long studying them.

 The thing has discarded them wholesale.  Still clothed, some wearing their jewelry.  All the flesh remains on the bone, so it doesn't want them for meat.  Some of the older remains have desiccated enough to give me a clue as to cause of death: trepanation.  I focus in on one skull in particular.  The skin at the temple seems almost peeled away, the bone, too.

 I leave the corpses and continue into the lair, moving down to the center of the quarry.  The thing has set up its hideout deliberately, and through the gloom I can see bones arranged in vertiginous spirals for no purpose I can fathom, like ossified crop circles.

 As I draw closer to the center of the spirals, I see movement from the corner of my eye, sinuous and somehow oozing.  I have impressions as it rushes me, viscous flesh, rending claws, writhing tentacles in lieu of a face _._

 In close quarters like this, Save the Queen would prove a liability.  I reach to my side, for the elegantly curved sword Raubahn gave me years ago.  He said I needed a blade to carve my path.  Not my weapon of choice, but with a charm all its own.

 White eyes without pupils meet mine and I feel as though an artillery shell has gone off in my skull.  The magic tastes of wormwood and copper.  Pain radiates outwards like lightning and my fingertips start to go numb. I push back against it, fighting against the paralysis spreading through my nervous system.  The agony brings a smile to my face.  It's a cute trick.

 I want it.

  **Flagellum**

 I have what I needed from the thing, and its corpse lies cooling at my feet.  I'd love to take my time with the body and really study the thing, but Raubahn's words have me intrigued.  And however extensive the catacombs, they lack a decent autopsy table.

 I kneel down beside the corpse, trying to determine where I should start when I see a glint of something near the neck, a hint of metal a shade cooler than the body around it.  I brush the tentacles aside and edge closer to see… a necklace.

 The monster wears jewelry.  Surprising.  But the real shock comes when I get the necklace free and examine the little pendant hanging from it.  A delicate piece of worked metal, too large for a coin.  Intricate gold filigree around a black background.  On top of the black, a two-headed serpent.

 I recognize it.  How could I not?  I have one just like it.

Raubahn gave it to me.

  **Aposematism**

 We have settled onto the cushions and started to sip our tea.  I reach into my pocket for the talisman, the two-headed serpent.  Even as I place it on the table, his eyes never leave mine.  The token clicks slightly as I place it on the wood, the sound muffled and distant by the unnatural properties of Raubahn's study.  I leave it there between us, hanging like a question.

 He speaks without preamble, letting the hammer fall.  "You have faced the truth and taken the life of a colleague you never knew.  Your actions do you credit."

 I suspected as much.  Still, I have to know.  "How – what happened to him?"

 "Transformation is the fate of those who drown themselves in blue magic and fail to control the power raging within."  He lets the words linger for a moment before continuing, his tone almost maddeningly casual.  "They lose the ability to maintain their form, and the mortal vessel is destroyed." 

 "You called it poison."

 "And now you see why," he nods.

 I point to the talisman.  "So he took one dose too many, and it destroyed him."

 Raubahn's jaw shifts in displeasure.  " _He_ lost control.  Those who lose their mortal form are no better than monsters. Will you keep your form until the end?"  He asks the question as if issuing a challenge.

 "What about stopping when the magic is under control?  What if I decide I've had my fill of poison?"

 He produces one of his packets and places it on the table, again, never looking away from me.  He settles back on his cushion and watches, patient and inscrutable.  Like Raubahn at the heart of his labyrinth, the lesson appears suddenly.

 "Strange things afoot on the Gotland Peninsula," he says.  "That is, _if…_ "  His voice trails off, subtly mocking, almost playful.

 I eye the packet of instructions sitting on the table, a two-headed serpent waiting to strike.   Raubahn and I both know the outcome of this battle.  I nod, reaching for it.  Damn my weakness.  We stand, and I shake my head.  "You said there were two paths.  You never said I had a choice."

 A corner of his mouth twitches, a half-moment of amusement before vanishing as he reaffixes his veil.  "Our desire is our strength.  Hunt down the beast and gorge your fill." He stabs a finger at the talisman I brought back from the catacombs.  "Seize the power to forge your _own_ destiny."

 At the curtain, I turn to look at him again, the intensity of his eyes glowing through the darkness.  He waves a hand, gesturing to the shop beyond his lair.

 "On the table," he says.  "I took the liberty."  I recognize the tone of dismissal.  No more answers today.

 I step out into the shop and cross to the table.  The reading woman never looks up at me, despite my having to move within arm's reach of her.  I detect the hint of a smile, though.

 A flat garment box sits in front of her, devoid of any label.  I pick it up and take it with me as I exit the shop.  Once I have stepped out into the street, I open the box and plunge my hand inside.  The silk within cascades between my fingers. Without looking, I know its color.

**Author's Note:**

> Waoud/Raubahn is a blue mage from Final Fantasy XI. Pieces of his dialogue (and concepts relating to blue magic) are drawn from that game.


End file.
